I mentioned over the weekend how comically bad it is that Chris Christie says the phrase “Occupied Territories”, a standard if not the only way of referring to the West Bank of the Jordan, and not only gets knocked on it but actually has to apologize to territorial maximalist poobah Sheldon Adelson. But there’s another part of the story that goes beyond Christie’s dignity loss and the increasingly explicit and binding alliance between the Israeli right and the Republican party.
I wanted to bring you all up to date on where we are on pushing our new commenting engine online. Details and schedules after the jump.
Take a moment to read this heartbreaking piece from Northwestern associate law professor Sheila A. Bedi in TPM Cafe today:
The little girl could not have been more than 5 years old. She was wearing a purple polka-dot dress and her hair was pulled tight into ponytails tied with purple ribbons. On her feet were sparkly shoes. Someone had taken great care to dress her and on this grey fall morning in October 2013 she was all sunshine and light.
She skipped towards the large, fortress-like building. She turned towards me and gave me a joyful smile, and said “I’m going to see my daddy today.”
And then together we walked through the doors of the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois.
We now have one of the first systematic analyses not of the number of sign-ups under Obamacare but of the number of people who were previously uninsured but are now insured because of the law. And the number is big: at least 9.5 million people.
In case you missed it this weekend, Pope Francis made another dramatic break with tradition over the weekend, publicly confessing sin at a Vatican ceremony. You can watch the video here. Another part of Francis’ aggressive de-regalization of the papacy.
The curiously inverted politics behind why neither Dems or GOPs want to discuss the current price tag of Obamacare.
After the most tumultuous and embattled year of his decade-long rein over Turkish politics, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP scored convincing wins in local elections across Turkey today. In line with the increasingly authoritarian character of his government, Erdogan pledged retribution against opponents he claims are trying to overthrow his government from within.
Both hilarious and amazing. At the Adelson audition this weekend in Vegas, Chris Christie used the utterly uncontroversial term “occupied territories” to basically argue that Israel should retain the territories for security reasons – not bad for appealing to hyper-Zionist maximalist right-wing Christians and their sprinkling of right-wing Jewish supporters. But he then had to personally apologize to Adelson for using the term.
Like I said, amazing and comical and ridiculous. Both Adelson’s power and the need for any Republican to kow-tow to the most extreme variant of right-wing pro-Israel opinion that all the land west of the Jordan is part of the Israeli state proper.